The clients for this Washington, D.C., renovation have young children and a modern art collection—both of which tend to thrive in open floor plans. But the original 1876 house in the city’s Georgetown neighborhood was “a series of very small, compartmentalized spaces,” according to architect Robert M. Gurney, FAIA. He ended up gutting the deteriorating house and reconfiguring the plan with larger, fewer rooms that better accommodate the owners’ lifestyle.

Gurney didn’t want to lose the project’s historic character, though, so he had all of the wood and plaster moldings within the existing home’s footprint matched and remade. He stripped off an old addition on the back of the house and replaced it with a light-filled new one of steel and glass. “It’s a synthesis of the new and modern with the old,” he says.